Remote control devices to allow a user to remotely control the operation of electrical and electronic appliances are well known and have been around for many decades. In the earlier days, manufacturers configured appliances to operate with a dedicated remote control device which was programmed with a particular identification code which allowed the device to pair with the appliance, generally communicating using infrared (IR) or radio frequency (RF) communications to control the device. Each appliance required its own remote control device so that a household frequently found itself with numerous remote control devices for controlling the various televisions, air conditioners, and other controllable appliances generally found in a typical home.
In order to solve the problem of dealing with multiple remote control devices, universal remote control devices were developed. These were preprogrammed with a relatively large number of identification codes which allowed the device to pair with those appliances whose identification codes were among those programmed into the device, thereby allowing control of numerous appliances. Nevertheless, these universal remote control devices were limited to controlling only those appliances whose identification codes were preprogrammed into the device, and required extensive amounts of time to locate the correct identification code for each appliance from among all those stored in the device.
With technological advancements and the increase in popularity of the Internet, universal remote control devices were developed as part of systems which could access databases through the Internet in order to download the identification codes to the devices. These databases generally stored a large number of identification codes suitable to allow the remote control devices to communicate with and control a large number of appliances of different types and from different manufacturers. An example of such a system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,586,398 B2 to Huang et al., which discloses “A system and method for using an RFID tag to automatically setup and configure a universal remote control to command appliances of various types and various manufacturers”. Another example of such system is described in US Patent Application Publication No. 2012/0295662 A1 to Haubrich which discloses “A universal remote control system and method for employing a centralized database for programming the universal remote control (URC) to control the operation of appliance(s). The appliance(s) may or may not be made by different manufactures. The centralized database is accessible via the Internet and includes many different appliances made by many different manufacturers. The user may access a web site of the centralized database and manually enter electronic appliances identifying data that the URC is desired to operate, and then the centralized database sends the appropriate command code data to the URC either directly or temporarily downloads them into a computer to be later loaded into the URC. The centralized database includes command codes for appliances such as TV sets, DVDs, CD systems, alarm clocks, and VCRs, music synthesizers, toys, stereo systems, ovens, washing machines, timers, power strips, and the like”.
More recently, with the explosive increase in the global use of smartphones and their continuously-expanding processing power, the trend is to implement universal remote control devices in the smartphones. Numerous application programs have been developed which allow a user to control electronic multi-media devices and other electronic and electrical appliances from a smartphone. U.S. Pat. No. 8,519,820 B2 to Cannistraro discloses “Systems and methods for saving and restoring scenes in a multimedia system with minimal configuration are provided. The techniques of the present invention can allow the states of the components in the multimedia system to be captured in a scene. Once the scene has been saved, the scene can be restored at a later time. A remote control system for recommending scenes by comparing states of components in the current scene with states of components in saved scenes is also provided. The remote control system can also recommend scenes based on usage patterns. Moreover, the remote control system can allow users to designate one or more saved scenes as favorite scenes”.